To the Women Voters of California
YOU have come into your own in the "Golden State." It is yours to help in a more direct way to shape the future destiny of this great commonwealth. There will come before you this autumn a proposed Sunday law. You will be asked through the Initiative to legislate such a law into the statutes of California. Fervent appeal will be made to your intense religious nature, to your devotion to ideals and to Christianity. You will be asked to follow the fashion of other States, and enact a Sunday law borrowed from medieval or Puritanic times. We appeal to your good sense, your intuition, and your knowledge of real conditions. You know that men can not be made religious by law. You know that pleasure seekers can not be made Sabbath keepers by law. You know that every man and woman ought to have the right to spend his or her day of rest as he or she may choose. Your knowledge of conditions here and in the East tells you that people can keep Sunday here, and do keep Sunday here in California, without a Sunday law, as well as they keep it in Eastern States under the most stringent Sunday laws. You may not know that there is now on the statute-books of California a law guarding man's right to rest one day after six consecutive days of labor, without naming the day. This guards the working man. Your knowledge of the genius and spirit of Christianity teaches you that persuasion and prayer and the Word of God must make souls Christian if at all, and that they can not be made Christian by coercion or compulsion. Will you preserve these issues of our journal on religious liberty, study them, and know for your own selves where right and truth and justice lie? Your mothers, your sisters, your fathers, your brothers, have suffered and died for liberty. In memory of them and for the sake of Christ and the future, help to perpetuate liberty in California, that religion may be as free as the streams from the mountain and the breezes from the sea. Vote "NO" against any and every Sabbath law, or class legislation, or religious legislation. You feel you have suffered from class legislation in the past. Let the future legislation be general and liberty-serving in all respects.